Video: Investing in yourself

If you want to increase your value per hour, and be more successful in your career, how much time are you willing to invest outside of work hours to improve your ability? It's common for employees to feel that they should only work the hours for which they're getting paid. It's certainly important to do your job, but you also want to invest in your career by regularly improving your skills outside of your day to day job duties. This will enhance your ability, increasing your value per hour, and your job security.

Join author and business coach Dave Crenshaw as he demonstrates ways to discover what you're truly best at doing and how to leverage those strengths and abilities in your professional life. This course reveals how to uncover your strengths and talents, match them to job responsibilities, and develop a path to apply those strengths at work. Set yourself up for continued success with self-assessments and the ability to invest in yourself and make continual improvements as your career grows.

This course is one of a series of five Dave Crenshaw courses based on his Invaluable teaching methodology for professional development.

Investing in yourself

If you want to increase your value per hour, and be more successful in yourcareer, how much time are you willing to invest outside of work hours toimprove your ability?It's common for employees to feel that they should only work the hours for whichthey're getting paid.It's certainly important to do your job, but you also want to invest in yourcareer by regularly improving your skills outside of your day to day job duties.This will enhance your ability, increasing your value per hour, and your job security.

You can make this investment in yourself by following a simple five step process.The first step is to determine the time investment you are willing to make,whether its one hour a week, or more, make a decision on the amount of timeyou're willing to spend improving your ability.Then budget that time by scheduling blocks of time in your calendar.Call it your ability investment, or some other descriptive title.Scheduling time in advance in your calendar will make it easier for you tostick to your commitment.

The second step is to choose an area of study.If you've completed the previous videos, you have gone through an exercise toidentify your talents and job responsibilities.Now pick the areas that you are going to focus on,let's say, for the next month. The best choice will be related to your toptalents; those one, two, or three things you do best.Spend extra time to improve those talents in a way that benefits both you, and the company.

The third step is to gather your materials for the course that you arecreating for yourself.You're going to find your own textbooks and other materials to improve theability you selected.If I'm trying to improve my ability with computers, I might choose books ormagazines about computers, or I might decide to enroll in online courses onparticular technologies.You can pool resources not only from books, and magazines, but also Web sites,blogs, and community classes.

Step four is to commit to a deliverable. Tell a friend, a mentor, a coworker, orideally your manager about this ability investment that you're making.Let them know that you're going to deliver an assignment to them to demonstratewhat you've learned.Commit to a specific date, and ask them to put that date in their calendar tohold you accountable.This will strengthen your commitment, and allow the other person to play asupportive role for you.

By being involved from the outset, they will want to support you, and give youwhatever resources they can to help you succeed.And the fifth step is to work the schedule that you created.At the scheduled time you have set for yourself, stop whatever you're doing, andfocus on that ability improvement.Make sure it doesn't get in the way of your normal job responsibilities, buttakes place outside of the work schedule as an investment in yourself.As you follow your training schedule, and create deliverable projects to youraccountability partner, you'll see that your talents grow, and you will progresssteadily toward becoming invaluable.

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Q: This course was updated on 01/03/2012. What changed?

A: This course was retitled, streamlined, and refined throughout, resulting in a slightly shorter runtime. We also added new graphics and a new welcome movie.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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“In a way, I feel like you are rooting for me. Like you are really invested in my experience, and want me to get as much out of these courses as possible this is the best place to start on your journey to learning new material.”— Nadine H.

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